“I couldn’t connect with the characters.” As readers, we’ve all said that, at one time or other, and if you’ve written for publication, I guarantee you’ve heard it from agents or editors who turned down your work. But what does it imply? Is that connection entirely subjective, a matter of taste, and therefore meaningless except for that audience of one? After all, what kind of connection can you expect when there are so many books written about so many different characters?

I thought about these questions as I compiled my annual list of favorite books I’ve reviewed in the past year. They include three mysteries, a thriller, two picaresques, a Holocaust novel, a snapshot of youth, another of old age, and a tale of an infamous miscarriage of justice. I call just about all of them literary. But the one common thread? The characters compelled me. I wanted to know more about how they felt, because I could feel along with them. I expected to learn something about human nature from them, and I did.

Contrast that with two much-heralded novels I put aside recently, one about a woman who explores the Arctic, and the other, about a lynching. Compelling premises? Sure. Beautiful sentences? You got ’em. But these novels didn’t grab me. I didn’t know how the characters felt, even though the authors tried to tell me–and the problem wasn’t just that the narratives told rather than showed. The authors must have thought they created an emotional connection, but I felt none. I thought I was reading about events or actions or attitudes, and however unusual or significant they were, attention-grabbing by their content, they remained abstract.

Not that it’s easy to write that emotional connection. Last month, I attended a workshop given by the literary agent Donald Maas about his book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction, which I’ve mentioned before. I’d gone to the workshop with a half-completed novel–half a house completed, if you will–and hoped to find out what could help me pull it together and finish it. By the third day, I realized that all I had was a big hole in the ground and a lot of building materials scattered around it.

So I’m very impressed with the following books and authors, who, no matter what their story or premise, have created that elusive emotional connection. In no particular order:

The Ballroom, by Anna Hope, tells of a man and woman trapped in a paupers’ institution in Yorkshire in 1911, and how he courts her through smuggled letters, unaware that she can’t read. Another desperate institutional romance, The Golden Age, by Joan London, takes place in an Australian sanitarium for juvenile polio victims in 1946. The kids, though stricken with a life-changing and potentially fatal disease, are much healthier than their parents and have bigger hearts.

By contrast, Sabina Murray’s Valiant Gentlemen takes place on a very large stage, starting with the Congo in the 1880s. Murray dazzles you without being self-conscious and sifts through the most serious subjects without taking herself too seriously–only two of the many pleasures of this novel re-creating actual historical figures. Steven Price’s By Gaslight, equally evocative, takes you into London’s underworld of 1885. It’s a long book, 731 pages, and Price builds his enthralling tale atom by atom.

Darktown, Thomas Mullen’s terrific mystery about two African-American cops in late 1940s Atlanta, is so tense, you think the novel might combust at any moment. Its deeply explored theme, racial politics within law enforcement, couldn’t be more timely. Gods of Gold, Chris Nickson’s mystery set in late Victorian Leeds, depicts the bare-knuckles life of a dreary industrial English city as well as the uphill struggle to uphold the law. Nickson conveys a depth of feeling and atmosphere in remarkably few words.

When the judges are the criminals, as they are in Crane Pond, Richard Francis’s retelling of the Salem witch trials, there’s no end to deviltry. But if you think you know the story, think again, for this judge was the only one to repent his actions, and the man’s internal struggles are compelling indeed. Crane Pond may be the most memorable book I read this year. And speaking of struggle, Mary Doria Russell’s, Doc, as in John Henry Holliday, wants to live life to the fullest in frontier Dodge City. A brilliant dentist, virtuoso pianist, and card shark, he inspires almost universal respect–but he’s dying of tuberculosis at age twenty-two.

Paulette Giles offers a very different view of the West in News of the World, about an itinerant town crier who reads newspapers to audiences starved for stories of other places. His outlook, demeanor, and personal code make him an irresistible character; I wish I knew someone like him. Better yet, I wish he were running the country. Amor Towles tells an inverse story to that in A Gentleman in Moscow, about an enemy of the Soviet state who’s sentenced to lifetime imprisonment in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. From this circumscribed life springs a tense, richly emotional and intellectual journey on a Tolstoyan scale.

Coincidentally, the last three on the list are the last three I reviewed–or maybe it’s no coincidence, since I finish few books these days unless they truly draw me in. Golden Hill, Francis Spufford’s version of an eighteenth-century picaresque about a man arriving New-York in 1746 bearing a draft worth a thousand pounds, is a marvelous, page-turning moral tale. Is Richard Smith a bounder, a swindler, or an honest man worthy of immediate inclusion in high society? Everyone who’s anyone in New-York takes sides. A Single Spy, William Christie’s heart-stopping World War II thriller about an NKVD agent who doubles for the Abwehr, portrays a man who’s feral and disturbed, yet sympathetic. Impossible, you say? Read it and decide.

Finally, A Boy in Winter, by Rachel Seiffert, is simply one of the best Holocaust novels I’ve ever read. Set in Ukraine in 1941, her narrative has no heroes, speeches, nor forced redemptive moments, offering her characters only the chance of mercy.

Ella Fay feels so oppressed by the Yorkshire textile mill at which she works that she breaks a window in a frenzied fit. For her crime, and because this is England in 1911–when the lower classes aren’t deemed to have feelings, let alone to be worth understanding–she’s bundled off to Sharston, an institution on the moors.

West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, (later High Royds Psychiatric Hospital), was the model for Sharston. One of Hope’s forbears was an inmate, for a time (courtesy highroydshospital.co.uk, 2006, via Wikimedia Commons)

Sharston is a desperate place that mingles the mentally disturbed with people who only seem so or who plainly aren’t, and whose only offense is poverty. But no matter how they got there, they know that no one leaves except feet first, about which there are many terrible rumors and some hard evidence, for a few men are assigned to dig the common graves.

John Mulligan is one, a man weighed down by promises he broke and wrong turns he made. But he’s sensitive and intelligent–far more than the asylum officials who keep him locked up–and you sense that something within yearns to break out and, if necessary to break heads.

But Sharston has one redeeming activity. Though the men and women are strictly segregated, once a week, those who’ve behaved themselves are allowed into the ballroom to dance. Through John’s eyes, you see the anticipation:

The men on John’s side disappeared off to the washrooms, and when they came back they had scrubbed faces and hair spat on and smoothed down. You could taste their excitement, thick and sticky, filling the air and leaving room for little else. It disturbed the far-gone ones on the other side, who got restless in their chairs and moaned and shouted out. John sat himself in the corner and took small shallow breaths, trying not to let it in; it was a terrible dangerous contagion, hope.

John and Ella dance, and from that springs an unlikely romance. What a tender plant it is, their love, for, if discovered, it will be uprooted; and meeting outside dancing hours is strictly against the rules. But John contrives to write Ella letters and smuggle them to her. At first, he only describes the sky and trees he sees during his work, because he knows Ella’s shut inside, as are all the women, which he considers an outrage. But what he doesn’t know is that Ella can’t read, and that she must ask her friend Clem to help her. (Clem is short for Clemency, an ironic name, for she receives none.) So Clem becomes Fay’s scribe, deriving perhaps too much vicarious pleasure from her role and inevitably forgetting where the boundaries lie.

It’s a brilliant touch, but no less so the character of Charles Fuller, the assistant medical officer. Fuller believes in eugenics, and as the novel opens, he’s struggling against the main intellectual current of his scientific faith, which says that enforced sterilization is the only way to preserve England. Otherwise, the nation will be overrun by the poor, the unfit, and the mentally ill, too depraved to know better than their savage ways, or even to care. It’s blood-curdling to read this tripe–even worse to know that such luminaries as Winston Churchill actually agreed–but at first, Fuller objects, because he believes that he can “save” John Mulligan and burnish his own career by doing so. So he makes many observations about John, intending to write a paper contesting that certain promising asylum inmates may, in fact, be rehabilitated.

However, Fuller has a deeper conflict. He’s a repressed homosexual, and he believes that if he followed his desires, not quite expressed but tangible nonetheless, he’d be filthy, dangerous, and depraved. In other words, he’d be no better than Sharston’s population, whom he holds himself above with a tenacity that shows how inadequate he feels (and once you meet his parents, you know why). Consequently, since he can never follow his heart or be happy, he hates anyone who can. John and Ella, be warned.

I criticized Hope’s previous novel, Wake, for the shallowness of the male characters. Nothing could be further from the truth in The Ballroom. Fuller, John, and John’s friend, Dan Riley, are complete people, and several minor male characters come across strongly as well. I think Hope relies too heavily on coincidences, of which one’s okay, but three’s a crowd. Similarly, Fuller’s behavior doesn’t always seem consistent with his character, as if his erratic boomerangs served the author’s purpose too conveniently. And, as usual, I wonder why Hope needs her prologue, which, also as usual, compromises the tension somewhat.

Nevertheless, The Ballroom is a marvelous novel, full testimony to the power of love, and I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

You might think that the four-day runup to Armistice Day, 1920, in London, and the burial of the Unknown Warrior that took place, would make a thin premise for a novel. After all, what tension could there be in a public funeral? Moreover, the unidentified soldier, exhumed from a battlefield in northern France, has been dead for years and belongs to no one in particular.

But he also belongs to anyone who suffered loss, which is to say, the whole nation. And as with any intimate, familial funeral, the coming ritual stirs fear, jealousy, pain, renewed grief, and fury, as well as harrowed hearts longing for release. Wake turns the national day of mourning into a family affair, one of many families. For most, loss has stunted them and left them unable to love or even venture outside their fears. Naturally, their paths cross in unusual ways.

There’s Evelyn, who works for the pension office. It’s an utterly thankless job, but she’s not looking for fulfillment. Her lover died in the war, and her younger brother, the only kindred spirit within the family, has returned from France a brittle wreck. He scorns Evelyn for being bitter, and maybe she is. But she also speaks of the anger that can’t go anywhere, because nobody will listen:

Someone should do the world a favor. They should take one of those great guns that they wheel out for the occasion and turn it around; they should train it on the massed dignitaries at the Cenotaph, in the abbey, on the king and Lloyd George and Haig and the whole lot of them, should shoot them while they sit there, their old heads bent in prayer. . . . Hypocrites, stinking hypocrites all.

There’s also Ada, who can’t quite believe her son is dead and sees his face in every crowd. Or Hettie, who makes sixpence a dance at a dance hall, and whose brother remains so shocked from the trenches that he seldom speaks or leaves his armchair.

I wasn’t surprised to read that author Hope once trained to be an actress, for her narrative often has a theatrical feel, clipping along in short scenes. She’s got an economical style, suggesting more than she shows. But cutting away before things get too complex sometimes feels like a bailout, and it restricts what you can see of her characters. This is especially true of the men, who appear to exist only in the moment, only on the surface.

By contrast, Wake portrays the women very well, showing how the war left them behind, in several ways. Evelyn curses the old soldiers who act as if they own the streets, the war, and its legacy. No matter what women did, or still do, they count for nothing by comparison, and all they hear is that their aspirations can and should go no further than having a husband and children. Without soapboxes or drumbeats, Wake vividly conveys this feminist rage, every ounce of which feels earned. Likewise, the class conflict between officers and “other ranks” comes through loud and clear, a truth that the praying hypocrites refuse to acknowledge.

On the downside, the crossed-paths aspect of Wake falls short. Hope’s a skillful storyteller, so the narrative fits together, but a few crossings feel contrived, and the coincidences mount up. Two are predictable, one of which she borrowed (perhaps unwittingly) from For King and Country, my favorite film about the war, starring Tom Courtenay and Dirk Bogarde. I don’t fault her for this–all novelists borrow–and you might as well take from the best.

What I do object to is the attitude, universal in Wake, that, once the expected glory had faded by mid-1916, nobody in Britain fought except from fear of punishment. What nonsense. Unlike the case with France or Russia, Britain’s initial allies, no mutiny ever took place among British forces, and support remained strong for a war that barely touched England’s shores. Soldiers hated the trenches and, often, the generals, but most believed in the cause, and the reverence that accompanied the burial of the Unknown Warrior stemmed partly from national pride. That the politicians basked in this feeling, as if they’d invented and deserved it, doesn’t mean that the people who fought for them were dupes or slaves.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.